One of the world's most esteemed and influential psychologists, Roy F. Baumeister, teams with New York Times science writer John Tierney to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it.

In Willpower, the pioneering researcher Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with renowned New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control.

In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation).

Baumeister's latest research shows that we typically spend four hours every day resisting temptation. No wonder people around the world rank a lack of self-control as their biggest weakness. Willpower looks to the lives of entrepreneurs, parents, entertainers, and artists-including David Blaine, Eric Clapton, and others-who have flourished by improving their self-control.

The lessons from their stories and psychologists' experiments can help anyone. You learn not only how to build willpower but also how to conserve it for crucial moments by setting the right goals and using the best new techniques for monitoring your progress. Once you master these techniques and establish the right habits, willpower gets easier: you'll need less conscious mental energy to avoid temptation. That's neither magic nor empty self-help sloganeering, but rather a solid path to a better life.

Combining the best of modern social science with practical wisdom, Baumeister and Tierney here share the definitive compendium of modern lessons in willpower. As our society has moved away from the virtues of thrift and self-denial, it often feels helpless because we face more temptations than ever. But we also have more knowledge and better tools for taking control of our lives. However we define happiness-a close- knit family, a satisfying career, financial security-we won't reach it without mastering self-control.

The simple but liberating message from this book is that willpower doesn’t necessarily reflect one's virtue or personality. It's a muscle-like psychological state that can be improved by deliberate pr...The simple but liberating message from this book is that willpower doesn’t necessarily reflect one's virtue or personality. It's a muscle-like psychological state that can be improved by deliberate practice or just some glucose. And, ironically, build behavioral routines to save your precious willpower for the necessary battles against yourself.(展开)

某GTD consultant弄了43个抽屉，其中31个为一月中的每一天准备，12个为一月中的每一年准备。写计划时必须写的切实具体。如果一件事需要准备才能做，在它前面写下需要为它做的准备。例如：“好好读x书”不合格，如果我还没有这本书，我先要在前面写上“去a网站订购x书”，如果我准备做笔记却还没有笔记本，先写上“在x商店买一个x牌笔记本，预算15-20元。”等等。BE SPECIFIC! BE SPECIFIC! BE SPECIFIC! 在做计划时越清晰，执行计划时需要improvise的部分就越少，需要消耗的willpower就越少。It is a limited resource, remember?

"放下"效应。如果有一件事要做却不知道它具体该怎么做(没有定下合格的计划)，那潜意识就会不断地耳语，很烦。人脑的挂起功能很差，或者我有一件事就完成一件，内存释放掉，或者我讲清楚when how做这件事，我不能indefinite地defer一件事,它会不停地跳出来烦我。So the lesson is clear. Do it next or make the plan describe specificly when and how to do it.例子：没听完的歌会一直在脑子里响，听完的歌反倒不会。所以遇到不好听的歌一定要听完(？换个歌用新的好听的歌填充脑子不就行了吗？)

Hyperbolic discounting:当诱惑触手可得时，我们倾向于过度降低对未来付出的估值。避免的方式之一是提前远离诱惑。方式之二是将正确与错误行为之间划一条bright line，使之毫无含混之处。因为任何含混都会让面对诱惑时的脑子一步步放松控制，最终way out of line.

self-esteem is earned.未经努力获得的self-esteem对performance有害无益。self-esteem leads to Narcissism，则更加有害，谁会喜欢一个事儿干得不怎么样，却又傲慢自负的人呢？自恋者通常make good first impression，但时间稍长就令大家感觉很差。

孩子的自控能力同时受基因和环境的影响。在自控能力方面，抛妻单亲家庭孩子小于早亡父单亲家庭小于普通双亲家庭。要想教会孩子自控，父母首先要自控。惩罚的三个方面:severity,speed and consistency里，severity的重要程度最低，speed更重要，consistency是最重要也是最难做到的。绝不可因为父母的情绪或体力来决定是放过这次infringement还是重重惩罚，必须完全按照事先清晰讲好的规则执法，不重也不轻，一次也不放过。随意地执行规则只会让孩子认为规则只是摆设，是否被抓到，发生在什么场合，父母高不高兴才是决定因素。即使在公共场合，仍然要不顾外人的眼光执行规则。对大点的孩子，邀请他们共同制定他们将要遵守的规则，他们会更可能遵守它们，即使没能遵守也愿意接受议定的惩罚。简而言之，briefly,calmly,consistently地执行规则。

Offense instead of defense：
People with high self-control use it not to get through crises but to avoid them.
Procrastination是因为控制不了impulsivenessr
1.Know your limits
消耗willpower的事太多了
2.Watch for symptoms
微小的信号:不耐烦，难以决定
对策：吃健康食物
3.Pick your battles
思考并设定合适的目标，一个月后回顾，重要的是每个月都有进步，不要急于求成
...

2012-03-31 14:522人喜欢

Offense instead of defense：

People with high self-control use it not to get through crises but to avoid them.

Procrastination是因为控制不了impulsivenessr

1.Know your limits

消耗willpower的事太多了

2.Watch for symptoms

微小的信号:不耐烦，难以决定

对策：吃健康食物

3.Pick your battles

思考并设定合适的目标，一个月后回顾，重要的是每个月都有进步，不要急于求成

willpower预算

设定工作时间：不要让困难的工作时间过长；

不要让任务占据了不必要的时间

（Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion）

4.Make a to-do list/at least a to-don't list

5.Beware the planning fallacy

低估完成任务需要的时间

对策：1.想想过去 2.别人的意见

6.Don't forget the basics

healthy food

sleep

neatness

学习和休息的地方分开

工作和娱乐的电脑分开

7.1.The nothing alternative 策略

2. if X than Y 策略（几乎不需要willpower）—— habit

3.precommitment（冷静状态下）

8.Keep track

monitoring

利用各种工具

9.Reward often

goal——reward

A mix of frequent small prizes（for small goals） with occasional big ones（for big goals）.

Willpower: the capacity to regulate thoughts, emotions, and actions.
"Willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise."
"People spend about a quarter of their waking hours resisting desires - at least four hours per day."
The most commonly resisted desires are the urges to eat, to sleep urges fo...

2012-02-27 03:05

Willpower: the capacity to regulate thoughts, emotions, and actions.

"Willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise."

"People spend about a quarter of their waking hours resisting desires - at least four hours per day."

The most commonly resisted desires are the urges to eat, to sleep urges for leisure and sex.

Much of self control operates unconsciously.

Ultimately, self control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.

To help preserve family harmony, people should leave work while they still have some energy. (Do not check your kids' test scores when you are exhausted and cranky from work because you will likely overreact.)

The effort to control emotional reactions depletes will power.

Ego depletion: results in slower brain circuitry. It causes a slowdown in the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain area that's crucial to self-control. As the brain slows down and its error-detection ability deteriorates, people have trouble controlling their reactions.

Its effect on behavior is strong, large and reliable, but its effects on subjective feelings are considerably weaker. Ego depletion seems like an illness with no symptoms.

Look not for a single symptom but rather for a change in the overall intensity of your feelings.

1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

Focus on one project at a time. When people have to make a big change in their lives, their efforts are undermined if they are trying to make other changes as well. So make one resolution and stick to it.

Four uses of willpower:

1. Control of thought

2.Control of emotions (affect regulation, focused on mood)

3. Impulse control (resisting temptations): you can't really control impulses, but you can control how you react to an impulse.

4. Performance control

The transformation of psychology based on ideas from biology was one of the major developments of the late 20th century.

Brain fuel: no glucose, no willpower.

Ego depletion shifts activity from one part of the brain to another. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. That may help explain why depleted people feel things more intensely than normal: certain parts of the brain go into high gear just as others taper off.

For kids: nutritious breakfasts are of paramount importance.

For women: whether or not they feel the acute symptoms of PMS, their bodies are short of glucose during the luteal stage. (Make sure to eat well)

Self control is tied in to body's rhythms and the fluctuations in its energy supply.

When you are healthy, your immune system may use only a small amount of glucose. But when your body is fighting off a cold, it may consume gobs of it (so postpone making important decisions when you are sick).

Hypoglycemic people tend to be more anxious and less happy than average. More prevalent in criminals and violent persons.

So

1.feed the beast.

2.Go for the slow burn (complex carbs, proteins, low-glycemic foods)

3.When sick, save your glucose for your immune system.

4.When tired, sleep. (Lack of sleep leads to the weakening of self-control and related processes like decision making)

(The things the book covers all seem to be common sense. There is nothing really new in the "what" aspect. But I feel it gives the reader insights regarding the "why" aspect. )

In psychology, brilliant theories are cheap. People like to think of the field advancing thanks to some thinker's startling new insight, but that's not how it usually works. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part. Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with "Oh, my grandmother knew that." Progress...

2016-05-03 09:52

In psychology, brilliant theories are cheap. People like to think of the field advancing thanks to some thinker's startling new insight, but that's not how it usually works. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part. Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with "Oh, my grandmother knew that." Progress generally comes not from theories but from someone finding a clever way to test a theory, as Walter Mischel did.
What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.
Sure enough, the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shoudn't sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they'd already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previous one.
We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts.
Another broad category is the control of emotions.
A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, Cinnabons, and cocktail waitresses.
Finally, there's the category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task at hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, perserving when you feel like quitting.
Apparently ego depletion shifts activity from one part of the brain to another. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. That may help explain why depleted people feel things more intensely than normal: Certain parts of the brain go into high gear just as others taper off.
Feed the beast. By beast, we don't mean Beelzebub. We mean the potential demon inside you or anyone spending time with you.
He describes it all as a quest for mental peace, for a "mind like water", the phrase he borrows from his karate lessons: "Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input: then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreact or underreact."
Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one's mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.
Once again, making a plan made a difference. Those who'd written about unfulfilled tasks had more trouble keeping their minds focused on the novel -- unless they'd made a specific plan to complete the task, in which case they reported relatively little mind wandering and scored quite well on the reading comprehension test. Even though they hadn't finished the task or made any palpable progress, the simple act of making a plan had cleared their minds and eliminated the Zeigarnik effect. But the Zeigarnik effect remained for the students without a plan. Their thoughts wandered from the novel to their undone tasks, and afterward they scored worse on the comprehension test.
The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconsious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconsious mind apparently can't do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifies like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconsicous can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.
If you've got a memo that has to be read before a meeting Thursday morning, the unconscious wants to know exactly what needs to be done next, and under what circumstances. But once you make that plan -- once you put the meeting memo in the tickler file for Wednesday, once you specify the very next action to be taken on the project -- you can relax. You don't have to finish the job right away. You've still got 150 things on the to-do list, but for the moment the monkey is still, and the water is calm.
Two-Minute Rule: If something will take less than two minutes, don't put it on a list. Get it out of the way immediately.
The link between willpower and decision making works both ways: Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you're les able to make decisions.
Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from the fear of giving up options. The more you give up by deciding, the more you're afraid of cutting off something vital.
People have a hard time giving up options, even when the options aren't doing them any good. This reluctance to give up options becomes more pronounced when willpower is low. It takes willpower to make decisions, and so the depleted state makes people look for ways to postpone or evade decisions.
"Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss", Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we're so eager to keep options open that we don't see the long-term price that we're paying -- or that others are paying.
Once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option.
Self-awareness always seemed to involve comparing the self to these ideas of what one might, or should, or could, be.
The mirror seemed a minor accessory — not even important enough to mention to the people — yet it caused profound differences in all kinds of behavior. If the people could see themselves in the mirror, they were more likely to follow their own inner values instead of following someone else’s orders. When instructed to deliver shocks to another person, the mirror made people more restrained and less aggressive than a control group that wasn’t facing a mirror. A mirror prompted them to keep working harder at a task. When someone tried to bully them into changing their opinion about something, they were more likely to resist the bullying and stick to their opinion.
Once you’ve taken the first two steps in self-control — setting a goal and monitoring your behavior — you’re confronted with a perennial question: Should you focus on how far you’ve come or how much remains to be done?
A failure, a slip-up, a lapse in self-control can be swept under the carpet pretty easily if you’re the only one who knows about it. You can rationalize it or just plain ignore it. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss. After all, the other person might not buy the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. And you’ll have even more trouble selling the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. And you’ll have even more trouble selling that excuse when you expand from one person to a whole social network.
By going public, you’re not just exposing yourself to potential shame. You’re also outsourcing the job of monitoring, which can ease the burden on yourself. An outsider can often encourage you by pointing out signs of progress that you’ve taken for granted. And when things are going badly, sometimes the best solution is to look elsewhere for help.
The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You recognize that you’ll face terrible temptations to stray from the path, and that your willpower will weaken. So you make it impossible — or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful — to leave the path.
We often think of willpower in heroic terms, as a single act at a crucial moment in life — sprinting at the end of the marathon, getting through the pain of childbirth, enduring an injury, dealing with a crisis, resisting the seemingly irresistible temptation, beating the impossible deadline. Those are the feats that remain in memory and make the best stories.
“The cure of their misgivings & doubts would have been found in action,” he wrote, rather than “enduring deadly monotony."
They used a series of methods to move people’s mental processes to either high or low levels. High levels were defined by abstraction and long-term goals. Low levels were the opposite. For instance, people were asked to reflect either on why they did something or on how they did something. “Why” questions push the mind up to higher levels of thinking and a focus on the future. “How” questions brings the mind down to low levels of thinking and a focus on the present.
The results showed that a narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstract, long-term focus supports it.
He needs the help of “bright lines”, a term that Ainslie borrows from lawyers. These are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately”, that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems — a dieter cannot stop eating all food — but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too.
Nearly all experts agree that children need and want clear rules, and that being held accountable for obeying the rules is a vital feature of healthy development. But rules are helpful only if children know them and understand them, so the brighter the line, the better.
Probably the best compromise is to give the teenager more say in the rule-making process, and to do it when everyone is in a calm, well-rested state — not when the teenager first comes home at two in the morning. If teenagers can help draw up the rules, they begin to see these as personal commitments instead of parental whims. If they negotiate a curfew, they’re more likely to respect it, or at least to accept the consequences for breaking it.
The more that children are being monitored, the more opportunities they have to build their self-control.
Remember, too, that the depleted state makes you feel everything more intensely than usual.
The fact that they ate less than the others is remarkable. The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree — and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat.
Those who had postponed gratification reported less desire to eat the candy than either the people who had refused the pleasure outright or those who had eaten their fill.
It takes willpower to turn down dessert, but apparently it’s less stressful on the mind to say Later rather than Never. In the long run, you end up wanting less and also consuming less. Plus, you may derive more pleasure because of another effect that was demonstrated in a different sort of experiment.
You could sum up a large new body of research literature with a simple rule: The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up. That means setting up your life so that you have a realistic chance to succeed. Successful people don’t use their willpower as a last-ditch defense to stop themselves from disaster, at least not as a regular strategy.
There’s no obvious “feeling” of depletion. Hence you need to watch yourself for subtle, easily misinterpreted signs. Do things seem to bother you more than they should? Has the volume somehow been turned up on your life so that things are felt more strongly than usual? Is it suddenly hard to make up your mind about even simple things? Are you more than usually reluctant to make a decision or exert yourself mentally or physically? If you notice such feelings, then reflect on the last few hours and see if it seems likely that you have depleted your willpower.
One way to avoid the planning fallacy is to force yourself to think about your past. If Tice’s dilatory student had seriously considered how long it had taken her to write previous term papers, she might have allowed more than a couple of hours for the next one.
This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing. You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, no side excursions anywhere on the Web. Just follow Chandler’s regimen:
“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself."
Willpower evolved because it was crucial for our ancestors to get along with the rest of the clan, and it’s still serving that purpose today. Inner discipline still leads to outer kindness.

The 1st step in self control is to set a clear goal.
Self control = self regulation
Regulating means changing, but only a particular kind of intentional, meaningful changing.
To regulate is to guide towards a specific goal or standard.
For most of us, the problem is too many of them, and many of them conflict, ie, work and family goals can often conflict.
Consequences of having conflicti...

2012-02-27 03:07

The 1st step in self control is to set a clear goal.

Self control = self regulation

Regulating means changing, but only a particular kind of intentional, meaningful changing.

To regulate is to guide towards a specific goal or standard.

For most of us, the problem is too many of them, and many of them conflict, ie, work and family goals can often conflict.

Consequences of having conflicting goals:

1. worry a lot: beset with involuntary and unpleasant ruminations

2. getting less done: action is replaced with rumination

3. physical and mental health suffers

Long term vs short term goals:

A short term perspective can make you more likely to become addicted, and then the addictions can further shrink and shorten your temporal horizon as you focus on quick rewards. Important to have the ability to see the connection between distant dreams and the current drudgery of daily life.

Fuzzy vs fussy plans:

Life rarely goes exactly according to plan, so the daily plan can be demoralizing as soon as you fall off schedule. With a monthly plan, you can make adjustments.

David Allen's "Getting Things Done":

Getting rid of the "monkey mind": "Most people have never tasted what it's like to have nothing on their mind except whatever they are doing. You could tolerate the dissonance and the stress if it only happened once a month,..Now people are just going numb and stupid, or getting too crazy and busy to deal with the anxiety".

Eliminate mental nagging by closing the open loops in mind.

Identify the specific next action to be taken for each task.

The Zeigarnik effect: uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one's mind ("earworm" that saps your energy). Once the task is completed and the goal reached, this stream of reminders comes to a stop. The unconscious is nagging the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders. Once you specify the very next action to be taken on the project, your mind will relax. You don't have to finish the job right away. You still have 150 things on the to-do list, but for the moment the monkey is still, and the water is calm.

"Whether you are trying to garden or take a picture or write a book, your ability to make a creative mess is your most productive sate. You want to be able to throw ideas all over the place, but you need to be able to start with a clear deck. One mess at a time is all you can handle. Two messes at a time, you're screwed. You may want to find God, but if you are running low on cat food, you damn well better make a plan for dealing with it. Otherwise the cat food is going to take a whole lot more attention and keep you from finding God."

In psychology, brilliant theories are cheap. People like to think of the field advancing thanks to some thinker's startling new insight, but that's not how it usually works. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part. Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with "Oh, my grandmother knew that." Progress...

2016-05-03 09:52

In psychology, brilliant theories are cheap. People like to think of the field advancing thanks to some thinker's startling new insight, but that's not how it usually works. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part. Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with "Oh, my grandmother knew that." Progress generally comes not from theories but from someone finding a clever way to test a theory, as Walter Mischel did.
What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.
Sure enough, the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shoudn't sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they'd already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previous one.
We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts.
Another broad category is the control of emotions.
A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, Cinnabons, and cocktail waitresses.
Finally, there's the category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task at hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, perserving when you feel like quitting.
Apparently ego depletion shifts activity from one part of the brain to another. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. That may help explain why depleted people feel things more intensely than normal: Certain parts of the brain go into high gear just as others taper off.
Feed the beast. By beast, we don't mean Beelzebub. We mean the potential demon inside you or anyone spending time with you.
He describes it all as a quest for mental peace, for a "mind like water", the phrase he borrows from his karate lessons: "Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input: then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreact or underreact."
Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one's mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.
Once again, making a plan made a difference. Those who'd written about unfulfilled tasks had more trouble keeping their minds focused on the novel -- unless they'd made a specific plan to complete the task, in which case they reported relatively little mind wandering and scored quite well on the reading comprehension test. Even though they hadn't finished the task or made any palpable progress, the simple act of making a plan had cleared their minds and eliminated the Zeigarnik effect. But the Zeigarnik effect remained for the students without a plan. Their thoughts wandered from the novel to their undone tasks, and afterward they scored worse on the comprehension test.
The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconsious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconsious mind apparently can't do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifies like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconsicous can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.
If you've got a memo that has to be read before a meeting Thursday morning, the unconscious wants to know exactly what needs to be done next, and under what circumstances. But once you make that plan -- once you put the meeting memo in the tickler file for Wednesday, once you specify the very next action to be taken on the project -- you can relax. You don't have to finish the job right away. You've still got 150 things on the to-do list, but for the moment the monkey is still, and the water is calm.
Two-Minute Rule: If something will take less than two minutes, don't put it on a list. Get it out of the way immediately.
The link between willpower and decision making works both ways: Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you're les able to make decisions.
Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from the fear of giving up options. The more you give up by deciding, the more you're afraid of cutting off something vital.
People have a hard time giving up options, even when the options aren't doing them any good. This reluctance to give up options becomes more pronounced when willpower is low. It takes willpower to make decisions, and so the depleted state makes people look for ways to postpone or evade decisions.
"Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss", Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we're so eager to keep options open that we don't see the long-term price that we're paying -- or that others are paying.
Once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option.
Self-awareness always seemed to involve comparing the self to these ideas of what one might, or should, or could, be.
The mirror seemed a minor accessory — not even important enough to mention to the people — yet it caused profound differences in all kinds of behavior. If the people could see themselves in the mirror, they were more likely to follow their own inner values instead of following someone else’s orders. When instructed to deliver shocks to another person, the mirror made people more restrained and less aggressive than a control group that wasn’t facing a mirror. A mirror prompted them to keep working harder at a task. When someone tried to bully them into changing their opinion about something, they were more likely to resist the bullying and stick to their opinion.
Once you’ve taken the first two steps in self-control — setting a goal and monitoring your behavior — you’re confronted with a perennial question: Should you focus on how far you’ve come or how much remains to be done?
A failure, a slip-up, a lapse in self-control can be swept under the carpet pretty easily if you’re the only one who knows about it. You can rationalize it or just plain ignore it. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss. After all, the other person might not buy the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. And you’ll have even more trouble selling the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. And you’ll have even more trouble selling that excuse when you expand from one person to a whole social network.
By going public, you’re not just exposing yourself to potential shame. You’re also outsourcing the job of monitoring, which can ease the burden on yourself. An outsider can often encourage you by pointing out signs of progress that you’ve taken for granted. And when things are going badly, sometimes the best solution is to look elsewhere for help.
The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You recognize that you’ll face terrible temptations to stray from the path, and that your willpower will weaken. So you make it impossible — or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful — to leave the path.
We often think of willpower in heroic terms, as a single act at a crucial moment in life — sprinting at the end of the marathon, getting through the pain of childbirth, enduring an injury, dealing with a crisis, resisting the seemingly irresistible temptation, beating the impossible deadline. Those are the feats that remain in memory and make the best stories.
“The cure of their misgivings & doubts would have been found in action,” he wrote, rather than “enduring deadly monotony."
They used a series of methods to move people’s mental processes to either high or low levels. High levels were defined by abstraction and long-term goals. Low levels were the opposite. For instance, people were asked to reflect either on why they did something or on how they did something. “Why” questions push the mind up to higher levels of thinking and a focus on the future. “How” questions brings the mind down to low levels of thinking and a focus on the present.
The results showed that a narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstract, long-term focus supports it.
He needs the help of “bright lines”, a term that Ainslie borrows from lawyers. These are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately”, that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems — a dieter cannot stop eating all food — but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too.
Nearly all experts agree that children need and want clear rules, and that being held accountable for obeying the rules is a vital feature of healthy development. But rules are helpful only if children know them and understand them, so the brighter the line, the better.
Probably the best compromise is to give the teenager more say in the rule-making process, and to do it when everyone is in a calm, well-rested state — not when the teenager first comes home at two in the morning. If teenagers can help draw up the rules, they begin to see these as personal commitments instead of parental whims. If they negotiate a curfew, they’re more likely to respect it, or at least to accept the consequences for breaking it.
The more that children are being monitored, the more opportunities they have to build their self-control.
Remember, too, that the depleted state makes you feel everything more intensely than usual.
The fact that they ate less than the others is remarkable. The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree — and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat.
Those who had postponed gratification reported less desire to eat the candy than either the people who had refused the pleasure outright or those who had eaten their fill.
It takes willpower to turn down dessert, but apparently it’s less stressful on the mind to say Later rather than Never. In the long run, you end up wanting less and also consuming less. Plus, you may derive more pleasure because of another effect that was demonstrated in a different sort of experiment.
You could sum up a large new body of research literature with a simple rule: The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up. That means setting up your life so that you have a realistic chance to succeed. Successful people don’t use their willpower as a last-ditch defense to stop themselves from disaster, at least not as a regular strategy.
There’s no obvious “feeling” of depletion. Hence you need to watch yourself for subtle, easily misinterpreted signs. Do things seem to bother you more than they should? Has the volume somehow been turned up on your life so that things are felt more strongly than usual? Is it suddenly hard to make up your mind about even simple things? Are you more than usually reluctant to make a decision or exert yourself mentally or physically? If you notice such feelings, then reflect on the last few hours and see if it seems likely that you have depleted your willpower.
One way to avoid the planning fallacy is to force yourself to think about your past. If Tice’s dilatory student had seriously considered how long it had taken her to write previous term papers, she might have allowed more than a couple of hours for the next one.
This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing. You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, no side excursions anywhere on the Web. Just follow Chandler’s regimen:
“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself."
Willpower evolved because it was crucial for our ancestors to get along with the rest of the clan, and it’s still serving that purpose today. Inner discipline still leads to outer kindness.

1 ego depletion
“Ego depletion,” Baumeister’s term for describing people’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions. People can sometimes overcome mental fatigue, but Baumeister found that if they had used up energy by exerting willpower (or by making decisions, another form of ego depletion that we’ll discuss later), they
would eventually succumb.
The Tor...

2014-05-04 22:49

1 ego depletion

“Ego depletion,” Baumeister’s term for describing people’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions. People can sometimes overcome mental fatigue, but Baumeister found that if they had used up energy by exerting willpower (or by making decisions, another form of ego depletion that we’ll discuss later), they

would eventually succumb.

The Toronto researchers paid special attention to the brain region known as the anterior cingulate cortex, which watches for mismatches between what you are doing and what you intended to do. […] Picking the right color proved to be especially difficult for the people in the Toronto experiment who had already depleted their willpower during the sad animal movie. They took longer to respond and made more mistakes. […] The results showed that ego depletion causes a slowdown in the anterior cingulate cortex.

So if you’d like some advance warning of trouble [ego-depletion], look not for a single symptom but rather for a change in the overall intensity of your feelings. If you find yourself especially bothered by frustrating events, or saddened by unpleasant thoughts, or even happier about some good news—then maybe it’s because your brain’s circuits aren’t controlling emotions as well as usual.

2 Lessons from the street and the lab

That’s more or less what researchers discovered after studying thousands of people inside and outside the laboratory. The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons:

1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

3 We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories: control of thoughts, control of emotions, impulse control, performance control.

4 One general guidanceit’s the same approach taken by Amanda Palmer: Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal.

5 There was one group that changed dramatically: Men who saw photos of hot women shifted toward getting an immediate reward instead of waiting for a larger payoff in the future. Apparently, the sight of an attractive woman makes men want cash right away.

Advertising agencies figured out long ago that men are more likely to splurge on a luxury product if it’s shown next to a beautiful woman.